Well, William Bowe has all the delicious details on the great Victorian Saturday night massacre, and my colleague Bernard Keane has some of the main lines of argument, so let me go back to 1834, when the seeds of this victory were laid down.

The common observation is that Victoria is now a thoroughly progressive state, and that the Victorian Liberal Party did not even begin to perceive the degree to which this has occurred. How the Libs managed to do that is quite a thing. Victoria, and Melbourne, may have been a hidebound place for decades, but it was always a "social liberal" place keen on collective and statist solutions.